England

By: Alex Mahoney

England, the main reason why we became our own country, caused all of the events that would happen due to the oppression of the colonists. Approximately 24.5 million people have roots that come from England, less than it would’ve been in the colonial era.

The great land of England is a nation in Europe that shares its land with Scotland and Wales. England is filled with its unlimited amounts of history and kings doing their own thing like they did for centuries; however, a lot has changed over time.

Some of the most interesting things that people don’t realize are that the English drink approximately 2.5 times more tea than Japanese and 22 times more than American’s or French people. Not to mention that for 300 years, 1066 to 1362, the official language of England was French, which seems wrong considering of their fighting over the time period of colonization and post colonization.
People in America base class off money, however in England money doesn’t matter; it comes down to background, education, manners, and way of speaking. Something strange that comes up while talking about class is that Oxford, the amazing, world renowned university, once had a rule that forbade people from bringing bows and arrows to class. To me that is a great surprise about a place like that, what could they have been doing?

People are always complaining about what goes on in public schools, or that they don’t like it; however, things are much different in England. They have public schools and state schools, not private and public schools like we have here. The free schools there are the state
schools, and the public ones are known for 13,500 pounds on average every year paid to attend school there.

When it comes to food and traditions of the English, the whole fish and chips thing, isn’t actually English at all, it’s really a Jewish idea of Joseph Malin back in 1860 was the very beginning. So it really was just one of those big misconceptions people have about different culture since they weren’t raised in it. A tradition that they have that would be found strange by most people today is that there is something they liked to do called cheese rolling in Brockworth, Gloucestershire. They gather once a year in May people “chase Double Gloucester cheese down the steep Cooper's Hill.” Yet as weird as that may sound they still have other events that involve cheese rolling.

It’s interesting to learn about what people who could’ve been related to you used to do. The real question now is that if you had a relative or ancestor from here, have they ever participated in such a strange pastime?